Adult Circumcision: Men, Sit This ‘Trend’ Out

“Circumcision is hot,” a California urologist tells the New York Post. Not for babies (in fact, that’s cooling off, especially in the West); rather, it's men in their 20s and 30s who are seeking out circumcisions, for religious, medical, and aesthetic reasons.

The Post article, “American Snipper,” has all the makings of a trend story: There's a celebrity peg (Omarion, who says he recently left “the turtleneck club”), a cursory treatment of cultural implications (one man got circumcised in order to feel more Jewish), a punny headline, and an inexplicable reference to kale and SoulCycle. But adult circumcision is dubious, as a trend. There is no data. The only experts quoted are people who remove foreskins for a living, plus NYC matchmaker Janis Spindel. And Spindel loses some credibility, because she apparently caters to women who want to know whether their dates are cut. “It’s come up with European men,” she told the Post. “Women find it disgusting to be intimate with a man who’s not circumcised.” (I mean, would you get your news from a matchmaker who took men’s labial preferences seriously?)

But if cosmetic adult circumcision is, in fact, a trend, we must advise style-conscious members of the turtleneck club to sit this one out. Here at the Cut, we know that fashion is cyclical. It might be hard to believe now, but before you know it, whiskered, flared jeans and those Western-style shirts with snaps will start to look right again. But unlike jeans, you can’t keep a foreskin in the back of your closet until it comes back in. Besides, who wants to have a Forever 21 dick? As Marilyn Monroe, Coco Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent, and Pinterest once said, “Fashion fades. Style is eternal.”